Hardy - A 1950s housewife: marriage and homemaking in the 1950s

The Village School, Boydell Press/Anglia TV, 1979

1804 That was the Year , Brechinset, 1986

The Story of Anne Candler, SPA, 1988

The Diary of a Suffolk Farmers Wife: 185469, Macmillan, 1992

Treasons Flame, Square One Publishing, 1995

Tattingstone: A Village and Its People, self-published, 2000

The House on the Hill: The Samford House of Industry 17641930,

self-published, 2001

Frances, Lady Nelson: The Life and Times of an Admirable Wife, Spellmount, 2005

The Cretingham Murder, The History Press, 2008

Arsenic in the Dumplings: A Casebook of Suffolk Poisonings,

The History Press, 2010

The Real Mrs Beeton: The Story of Eliza Acton, The History Press, 2011

A 1950s Mother: Bringing up Baby, The History Press

To all the housewives of the 1950s, their daughters and granddaughters.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all those who, with great generosity, honesty and good humour, shared their memories and often their precious mementoes with me. So my thanks to: Mesdames Angland, Billsberry, Bolton, Brittain, Coker, Hale, Hepburn, Jacobs, Lankester, Lawrence, Lemon, Perrins, Porter, Randall, Richardson, Slater, Smith, Stannard, Titshall, Watkins and Wheeler. Thank you too, to the Troll family of Cumbria, Pamela Henderson in Wiltshire and Patricia Yelland in Suffolk; valuable contributions also came from the members of the Grundisburgh Lunch Club and the 55 Alive group at the Chantry Library in Ipswich. My sincere thanks too, to the men who became involved in my search: Gordon Bolton and David Bray provided some very useful photographs. David Burnett gave information about the Suffolk chlorophyll industry while John Kirkland happily allowed me to draw on his wide knowledge of the banking world as well as the magazine collection of his late wife, Monica. My sister-in-law Ursula Hardy loaned me a very precious and most helpful copy of Womans Weekly , dating from 1959, while Rachel Field gave practical help and support. I am also indebted to the following representatives of the firms owning the copyright of some of the material used here: Emma Dally of Hearst Magazines, UK, for permission to include the Mince and Macaroni recipe from Good Housekeepings Popular Cookery , David Abbott of IPC Media, Colin Raistrick of Proctor &Gamble and Novia Imm of Hoover-Candy. Thank you, each and every one, but especially my loving and long-suffering husband, Michael, who unexpectedly found himself experiencing the life of a housewife during the writing of this book.

Jeans Story

Dianas Story

Popular Books of the 1950s

Popular Radio Programmes of the 1950s

Popular Television Shows of the 1950s

Popular Plays of the 1950s

Popular Musicals of the 1950s

Popular Films from the 1950s

Popular Advertisements in the 1950s

All the photographs and items of personal memorabilia herein have been reproduced with the permission of their owners, all of whom have been thanked in the Acknowledgements. However, in respecting those who wished for anonymity, it was decided that only descriptive captions should appear on each illustration.

T o someone who spends most of her time researching the lives of those who lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea that the second half of the twentieth could be classed as history came as a shock. How could the 1950s, a decade from my own life, possibly be looked at in a historical context? I was suddenly confronted with having to heed my own teaching. I had so often cautioned my audiences to beware of sweeping statements and stereotypical pictures of, for example, the Victorian Age, reminding them that Britain in 1837 was a very different place to the country in 1901. How often have I had to hold my peace when a class of children announced they had done the Victorians when in fact all their learning had been focused on a mixed bag of facts about the last twenty years of the reign.

Having recovered from the suggestion that I was now considered part of history, I began to see the advantages of writing about aspects of life in the 1950s. Doing the required research would at least give me a valid reason to bore my grandchildren with stories of what life was like when I was a girl. In an effort to be as accurate as possible, I enlisted the aid of others and together we set out down memory lane, trying hard not to fall into the trap of talking about the good old days on the one hand and exaggerating how hard life was on the other. We ended up amazed at the changes we have witnessed not all of them for the better and we lamented some of the things we had lost, but also gave thanks for the many benefits we have gained. It has done us good to examine our lives in relation to those of our parents and to look at where we fit into the social history of the twentieth century. I hope this book will be enjoyed by those who can say, Oh yes, I remember that! as well as those who didnt listen, but now wish they had, to the stories their mothers and grandmothers told them. And to the young who may one day be studying the history of Britain during the reign of Elizabeth II, I offer just a small insight into the lives of young women who became housewives in the 1950s.

There are those who describe the Festival of Britain in 1951 as the defining line between the past and the present: where we turned our backs on all that was old and looked forward with optimism to everything new. It is true that this Great Exhibition was indeed a showcase for what the country could achieve and held out promises of the comforts that could be ours sometime in the future. My own view is that the real turning point came in the mid-1950s, after rationing ended and many of the restrictions that had affected so many different areas of life were finally lifted. Even in so short a period as ten years, there were such vast differences in how life was lived that it was impossible to say this is how it was in the Fifties. And even to give a general view, it is necessary to look back to what helped to shape them.

The girls embarking on married life in the 1950s were products of the two or even three decades earlier. Their parents would have lived through the First World War, and it is likely that some of their fathers emerged from that with both physical and psychological injuries that would have affected their home life. The immediate post-war period of the 1920s is often depicted as a giddy, frivolous time as it was for a certain class but for the bulk of the population it was the era of great social unrest that, in the General Strike of 1926, highlighted the wide divide in the British class system. Of much greater impact was the period between 1929 and 1932, when the crash of the stock markets both here and in America had far-reaching economic effects, leading to what became known as the Depression. Unemployment was rife and home life for many was disrupted when fathers were forced to leave temporarily to seek work in other areas. This often left wives and mothers in desperate circumstances, scrimping to pay the rent to keep a roof over the heads of the family, as well as feed and clothe them all. Invariably, in an age when the only way out of a tight situation was to borrow money either by pawning items fathers best suit and mothers wedding ring being the most popular items or from a loan company that charged high interest, it was not long before the family was forced to seek assistance from the Poor Law Board. Niggardly allowances were often handed out in such a manner that did nothing to help the recipients feeling of self-worth a phrase and a concept unheard of at the time.